There is something a little strange about the way we talk about the future of work. Every company I talk to is trying to figure out AI. How to use it, where to use it, what to automate and how much more productive everyone should suddenly become because of it.
But the more technology we pile into work, the more obvious it becomes that a lot of the things holding us back aren't technical problems.
Research collected by Sounds True for its Inner MBA program looks at adaptability, emotional regulation, self-efficacy, grit and a growth mindset. These are the kinds of things we used to throw into the "soft skills" bucket. Increasingly, they don't feel very soft. They affect how people perform, whether they can lead and what happens when the plan inevitably changes. And right now, the plan is always changing.
Adaptability is probably the easiest place to start. A company can spend a year planning around one version of the future and watch the assumptions underneath it disappear in a few months. We have seen plenty of that lately. Research cited by Sounds True connects career adaptability with employability, promotability and income.
A growth mindset matters for basically the same reason. If you believe you can get better at something, you're more likely to keep learning when the job changes. You're also probably more willing to try something new and less likely to treat getting something wrong as proof you shouldn't have tried it in the first place.
Then there is self-efficacy, which is a slightly academic way of saying you believe you can handle what's in front of you. A meta-analysis involving nearly 50,000 people found employees with higher self-efficacy were more likely to help colleagues, raise concerns, provide better customer service and take on work outside their normal responsibilities.
None of this requires buying another platform.
Grit had a rough run as a business buzzword. It ended up on motivational posters and LinkedIn posts long enough that it became easy to roll your eyes at it. But the basic idea still holds up.
University of Pennsylvania psychologist Angela Duckworth has described grit as passion and perseverance toward long-term goals. The useful part isn't "work harder." Most people are already working pretty hard. It's sticking with something long enough to actually become good at it.
That gets harder when nearly everything at work is measured immediately. Clicks today. Revenue this quarter. Performance reviews this year. Meanwhile, expertise, trust, relationships and reputation take years to build and can disappear pretty quickly.
AI makes that difference more interesting. If everybody suddenly has tools that let them make things faster, making the thing isn't necessarily the advantage anymore. Knowing what is worth making, what deserves your time and when to keep going probably matters more.
This isn't just about individual employees becoming more resilient or self-aware. Companies pay for this stuff when their leaders aren't good at it.
Just 19% of organizations believe their leaders are effective at developing others, according to research included in the infographic. Another cited figure found 58% of managers had never received formal leadership training.
Employees obviously notice. Research from BambooHR cited by Sounds True found 90% of surveyed workers said a boss had influenced their decision to leave a job. Nearly half had experienced the very familiar problem of liking their job but not being able to stand their manager. Gallup has estimated voluntary turnover costs American businesses $1 trillion a year.
And suddenly "soft skills" sound a little more expensive.
Emotional regulation is a good example. It sounds like something that belongs in a self-help book until you've worked for someone who completely loses it when something goes wrong. How leaders react under pressure affects whether people tell them the truth, bring up problems early or quietly start looking for another job.
Workplace training around emotional regulation has been associated with improvements in job satisfaction, teamwork, cooperation and organizational climate. That's not particularly surprising. People generally do better work when they aren't spending half the day figuring out how to manage their manager.
There is another part of the Sounds True framework that corporate America is probably a little less comfortable talking about: spirituality. That doesn't have to mean religion. It can be purpose, connection, compassion or simply feeling like the thing you spend most of your waking hours doing has some meaning beyond the next performance review.
A McKinsey Health survey of more than 41,000 people found connections between positive spiritual health and other parts of wellbeing. That makes sense to me because the idea that people neatly separate "work Jeff" from "home Jeff" has always felt a little ridiculous. We're the same person. The stress comes home. The confidence comes to work. So do the relationships, insecurities, sense of purpose and everything else.
For years, companies have separated skills into two categories. Hard skills were the serious ones. Soft skills were the nice extras that helped everyone get along.
Technology is going to make a lot of technical skills easier to access. AI can already help people write, research, analyze data, code, brainstorm and learn things faster. Those capabilities will keep improving and spreading.
That doesn't make people less important. It changes which parts of being a person are valuable. Judgment matters. So does curiosity. Being able to change your mind matters. Being someone other people trust matters. Knowing when to keep going and when you're wrong matters too. None of those are particularly new skills, and that's probably the point.
We've spent the last few years asking what people need to learn so they can work better with AI. Maybe we've been looking at it from the wrong direction. The better question might be what becomes more valuable when everyone has AI. A lot of the answers look surprisingly human.